Affiliate Marketing: The Importance Of Merchant Communication

As some of you know, Profitistic are a no-fees affiliate network, which means that merchants can sign up (if they meet our standards criteria) without paying set-up fees.

This is great in that it enables merchants access to affiliate marketing without the usual barriers to entry, i.e huge fees. However, one downside to this is that due to the lack of fees, there can be less pressure on merchants to actively manage their campaigns which can lead to ongoing neglect and declining performance for all involved.

Some merchants seem to believe that if they have a campaign sitting on a network it will simply keep on performing because the network will look after it! Now, this is true to a point in that the campaign will always be available to affiliates, but if a campaign is left alone it will gradually stop performing.

Why?

Put simply, because affiliates need to know it is working and the best  and most obvious way for this to happen is through simple communication. Any merchant who runs an affiliate campaign should be ready to work at keeping it competitive, current, and to service affiliates with ongoing promotions, incentives and campaign-related data. Most merchants have competitors running similar campaigns and often the choice of who to run with will come down to small details.

Merchants need to put themselves in the position of the affiliate who has a choice of promoting the campaign of a merchant they has seen sitting on a network listing, or a similar campaign run by an active merchant offering current sales data, incentives, bonuses, etc.

If they were to do this, they may begin to understand the value of regular communication with affiliates.

Suffice to say, at Profitistic, we now encourage all affiliates to communicate as often as possible and inactive merchants removed from the network.